Hostel: Part II
Release Date:
June 8, 2007
You know what hurts? Having your eyeball ripped out by a total stranger while you are supposed to be enjoying a Slovakian vacation. Sure, there is cause to believe that if you choose to vacation in Slovakia, you deserve pretty much anything that happens to you, but that’s not the point here. Eyeball removal is a bad thing, especially when it isn’t fully disconnected from the socket and just kind of flops around on your cheek.
If you found the above disgusting, you either A) have not seen Hostel or B) have seen Hostel and did not enjoy it. I largely fall into category B though I gave Hostel a positive review at the time. I found the shocking sequences of over-the-top violence profound as well as deeply unsettling. Over time, they have struck me more as blatant shock value with people treating each other as horribly as has been done since the days of the Roman Coliseum. I am not alone in the assessment. Director Eli Roth has been accused of perfecting a new type of cinema: gorno aka torture porn.
Roth’s career started with the vomit-fest that was Cabin Fever, a movie where a bunch of sexy co-eds got sick, threw up and tried to kill each other. At my university, we called this Pledge Night, but I digress. Given the tremendous financial success of Cabin Fever, a film shot on a shoestring budget that earned $30.5 million, Roth was given his choice of new projects. He settled upon Hostel, an unsettling premise wherein loose Eastern European women lure boys to a Slovakian hostel. Promised hedonistic sex beyond their dreams, the boys willingly go there and enjoy hours upon hours of hot sex with women who believe shirts and bras are optional attire. The downside is that these women have a tendency to drug their men, then sell them to the local underground establishment, Elite Hunting. This organization is founded on the belief that the best type of hunt is when people hunt (then torture) other people.
The movie’s main character, Paxton (Jay Hernandez of crazy/beautiful), gets away along with the woman mentioned above who eventually chooses to throw herself under a train rather than wear a patch for the rest of her life. Hostel: Part II starts with him riding said train. He encounters a trio of women who do not realize that a classmate is luring them to a resort vacation under false pretexts in order to sell them off to Elite Hunting. Paxton apparently plays a key role in the movie again, meaning that he is going to never travel abroad again if he somehow survives this nonsense for a second time.
Hostel was a huge success, earning $47.3 million against a miniscule budget of $4.5 million. A sequel was always considered inevitable. Its success appears to be in the cards, but BOP wants to stress that if you are on the fence about seeing the movie, you should re-read the first paragraph and make certain you can stomach scenes such as this. (David Mumpower/BOP)
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